Sure, we can all breathe easier now, but still feels a little bumpy out there, eh? Though maybe you should ignore the incipient nausea…just relax & embrace the ride! ‘Cos I’m perversely encouraged by these fresh mini-bouts of panic we’ve been seeing this year. They’re a useful reminder investors still have a real wall of worry to climb here. Which is probably the most important & necessary pre-condition underwriting the durability of today’s bull market. [And yes, it’s only a bull market…when investors (esp. the man in the street) go from hoping they’ll make money, to knowing they’ll make money, that’s when we enter bubble territory]. However, we still need to see whether my macro investment thesis eventually plays out here – a thesis I express via a question:

Globally, we’re still conducting a truly unprecedented monetary (& fiscal) experiment…could we end up ultimately inflating the most incredible bubble ever?

If you think that’s ridiculous, we really don’t need to debate it here. Or rehash a complete litany of facts & figures which prove history must repeat itself – the ever-flattening US yield curve being the latest bogeyman. But I have to ask, what’s so bloody alarming about entirely average market P/E ratios…when interest rates are still anything but average?! And despite their trajectory, we’ll obviously continue to enjoy ultra-low long & short-term rates in absolute terms, while central banks (in aggregate) also continue to print money:

Yep, there’s the real boiler-room of this market – in every sense of the word – as this chart nicely demonstrates: